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“Perfectly?!” her roommate complained. “He only needed to hit it one time. That’s hardly a show for us.”
“I enjoyed it,” Tess said, joining Anna’s side. “As much as I’ll enjoy you cleaning all this up, I’m sure.”
Avril sighed loudly, and Liam grinned, tossing the ball before catching it.
“Better luck next time.”
Hurling her attention his way, Avril’s competitive spirit immediately reignited. “Oh, and therewillbe a next time. Many of them.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said, halfheartedly sighing for effect. “So, now what?”
“I’m sure you can figure that out,” she said, smirking.
“I’m sure I can,” he said, sighing properly this time.
While he spent the next ten minutes unwinding a couple hundred rubber bands from the ball, Tess forced Avril to clean up the mess that she’d enabled him to make, watching over her like a prison warden. Most of the larger chunks could be easily located and carried to the trash bin in the garage, while the smaller bits could be vacuumed. Along with the remnants of the cinder block went all the wrapping paper refuse, which ended up dumped into the recycling bin beside it.
Anna and Victoria spent those ten minutes hauling away their respective presents to their vehicles outside. While that happened, the gorgeous brunette, still overseeing Avril’s vacuuming with a single vigilant eye, offered him a bit of attention.
He’d stripped away over a hundred rubber bands by that point, leaving them in a rainbow-hued clump on the ground beside him. The six-inch diameter ball had lost a couple of inches by that point, though he’d yet to find what he was supposed to be looking for deep in its guts. Assuming there was anything there at all. He could easily envision a world in which Avril forced him to remove hundreds of rubber bands purposelessly, only to pull the item he’d been supposed to find out from behind her back and wave it in front of his face.
“Oops,” she’d say, grinning unabashedly. “Guess I forgot to stick this in there.”
Yet, what it might be, either locked under another hundred or so rubber bands or stowed elsewhere, he had no idea.
If itwaswithin his grasp, then it had to be awfully small. Even her cleverness couldn’t overcome the laws of chemistry. There was only so much matter that she could hide away under all these rubber bands.
At the end of the ten minutes, everyone else had finished their tasks. Everyone returned to the living room just in time to spot… something underneath the almost endless supply of rubber bands that Avril had seen fit to tire out his fingers with.
Liam squinted at the corner of some object as it peeked out from the severely diminished ball. Running his thumb over the edge, he realized it was metal but nothing else. Looking up at Avril, she offered him no shortcuts on unveiling what it was.
Twenty more rubber bands later, they could all plainly see that it was a metal cube he’d been meant to find. Shortly thereafter, he managed to tug it out of the last clump of rubber bands still around it. As they collapsed on the ground with the rest—Tess would never run out of rubber bands again—Liam, along with three equally curious women, stared at the metal cube.
It was a little smaller than a clementine, weighed barely more than a silver dollar, and didn’t seem to have any distinguishing colors or markings. It wasjusta silver-hued metal cube.
Yeah, right,Liam thought, figuring that Avril would have started crowing at him for wasting his time already if that was all it was.
Rolling it about on his palm, he carefully examined all its sides. In short order, he located a slight indentation on one of them, which keyed him into its purpose.
He stared flatly at Avril.
“Another container? Really?”
“I wonder what you’ll find inside,” she smirked.
A die.He’d already surmised it. The object within was going to be an oversized gambling die. And then he was going to be forced to roll it, and then depending on what number he rolled, some other time waster awaited him. He might not reach the end of all this before midnight tolled.
Swallowing a sigh, he pressed his thumb upon the indented side. It clicked, sinking a couple of centimeters, and upon the removal of his thumb, sprang open.
Pinching it between his thumb and forefinger, he dumped its secretive contents onto his palm.
It was a fortune cookie. Not a die.
Chapter Twenty-Three
New Year’s Eve Plans
Liam and the rest of the room stared confusedly at the item sitting on his palm. What had started with a lazily wrapped hammer had led him to… this? He’d smashed a cinder block and undone enough rubber bands that his fingers mildly throbbed… for this?
